Thursday, June 17, 2010

Utah to the Pac-10

The rumors, projections, closed door meetings and dealings are over and the celebration has begun.

The University of Utah is officially part of the Pac-10. The move from the Mountain West Conference to the elite league was quickly approved Thursday by the unanimous vote of Utah's Board of Trustees in a public meeting at Rice-Eccles Stadium.

"This is an absolutely great day to be a Ute," said longtime Utah athletics director Chris Hill.

Even though the super conference idea with the Big 12 South is deader than Michael Jackson, the idea that the Pac-10 has added more schools makes me like the situation that the conference is in. It's at least good they were proactive with expansion instead of reactive like the Big-12 errrr.... Big 10 now.

They didn't get the prettiest girl at the prom, getting schools like Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State would have blown up the Pac-10 to epic proportions. It also wouldn't have made a whole lot of geographical sense but whatever. It would have been great to get those big schools and big money into the conference but WSU fans... you wouldn't have been competitive ever again.

Colorado and Utah make sense though. First you capture the Denver and Salt Lake City markets which gives you an even bigger stranglehold out west. You give the Arizona schools somebody closer to develop rilvaries with. You keep the "travel partner" system together and you can hope and pray that Colorado and Utah develop into bitter rivals.

(Can somebody go and defecate on a John Elway statue in Denver and then put a Utah Jazz jersey on it?)

This gives Utah a chance to show that they're a national program after getting snuffed by the BCS for years. It's a very underrated school and has both strong football and basketball programs. It's also not BYU... which is great.

Colorado was one of the weaker schools in the Big 12 but I think it will do better since the bottom half of the Pac-10 is a lot worse than the Big 12.

Pac-10 fans might find the not becoming the Pac-16 might of been the best thing to happen to it.